Thursday, August 25, 2016

Every Job Has it's Weeds

Our son Dominyk has been working for the Physical Plant department at Patrick Henry and has been back at the job for about 4 weeks. And most of the time he has spent weed whacking. Literally. And since he has OCD he likes to complain about it, repeatedly. However, he is doing it, so we at least are doing well there. I can listen to the complaining, because, as I started to think about it, all of our jobs have weeds.

Weeds are the pesky little things that you have to do to keep your job. For example, when I was an adoption worker I loved being with the families. I loved being with the kids. However, I did not love case notes. But I did case notes because that was something I had to do to keep my job.

Sometimes upper level management likes to refer to the "weeds" as getting down into the details that are in job descriptions of someone else. This does not mean that their work is not valuable -- it means that if we are going to do our job of big-epicture visioning and planning, that our mind should not be tied up with something that someone else is better at. And I can imagine that from their perspective it isn't much fun to have us poking our nose into things that really belong to someone else.

But as I was thinking about Dominyk's literally weed whacking -- and the figurative weed whacking that I have caught myself doing over the past months -- I realized that not only do all of our lives include weeds, but our lives do as well.

For example, Bart loves to cook and we love to eat the food he cooks. However, none of us get excited about cleaning the kitchen. I love having a meeting with a bunch of cool people at church, but I am very grateful that someone else sets up the tables and makes the coffee. We like having clean teeth, but I don't know many folks who look forward to the dentist. It's all those weeds.

So we just keep going. We keep fighting the good fight. We do the fun stuff and we do the not so fun stuff. And in the end a great deal of the satisfaction we have comes from the fact that we persevered.